1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording apparatus having a device for attaching track number information to every track recorded in an information recording medium.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As an information recording medium in which music information and image information are recorded, a tape shaped information recording medium represented by a cassette tape, a DAT (digital audio tape), 8 mm tape and the like, and a disc information recording medium represented by an LD (laser disc), a CD (compact disc), an MD (mini disc), a DVD (digital versatile disc) and the like are known.
In recent years, writing and rewriting of information have been made possible in the disc information recording medium, and it has been remarkably spread combined with an advantage of quick access to the recorded information.
When music (hereinafter, simply described as “tune”) is recorded in the disc information recording medium, one tune is made to be a unit called a “track”, for example, and it can be controlled by attaching track number information. Such track number information is included in control information called a TOC (Table of content) recorded in the innermost peripheral part of the disc together with information to control recording data such as a disc name, a tune name, a tune number, a total playing time, a starting position and an ending position of the tune on the disc (a starting time and an ending time in the case of controlling the position by time information) and the like. When a user replays a recorded tune, he/she operates a recording, replaying and editing device for the disc to designate such track number information, and can select the recorded tune.
Incidentally, the number of tunes that can be recorded in one disc information recording medium has been remarkably increased due to improvement of information recording density in the disc information recording medium and a new information compression method. For example, the MD has conventionally adopted the information compression method called an ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding). Recently, an MDLP standard has been established in which the information recording is performed by the information compression method called an ATRAC3 having compression efficiency double or four times that of the conventional ATRAC. According to the ATRAC3, the maximum 320 minute recording is possible with a four times extended recording mode by the MD having 80 minute standard recording time. With such a new information compression method, about 60 tunes can be recorded in one disc even if the playing time of one tune is about five minutes.
However, as the recording medium can record such a grate number of tunes, it takes much time to select a tune for replay to complicate the control of the tunes. Accordingly, a method has been proposed that the user gathers one or a plurality of tunes to make them a group and control the tunes by every group (hereinafter, referred to as “group control”). In such a group control, since information such as a same group name is attached to the tunes that belong to the same group (same genre, for example), the user can firstly designate the group name and then designate the track number information that belongs to the group, and thus the user can efficiently select the tune to be replayed.
However, to perform the group control, the user must decide a group for each tune, or a group for a range of tunes and input a group name or the like to each group. Particularly, when recording many tunes from various kinds of media, grouping the tunes cab become complicated, and the user may suffer an operation load.
Further, an input operation to attach the information such as a name to each group may also become troublesome, and it also may give the user the operation load.